If it were 1999, most people would still be browsing the web on their US Robotics 56k modem (at best). This page is about 1 MB of assets (500kb gzip compressed if your browser supported it) , so it would have taken at least a minute just to finish loading.
"This page is about 1 MB of assets".
And it could easily have been 10 KB.
Closer to 2 as it was rarelly running at full 56kb/s.
Although, being patient was part of the experience as well
I got my first cable modem in 1998! All sites were still built for dialup, so everything was incredibly fast.
Yeah, but you know something? Flash worked damn near perfectly even on potato connections
Still pretty prevalent at that time, definitely, but DSL was definitely a thing by the time 1999 rolled around. I even had pretty fast DSL for the time -- 640 kbps.
But otherwise totally agree with the critique. Modern connection speeds have enabled a huge amount of bloat. I grew up when 1200 baud modems were the latest rage, and patience when downloading was a hard requirement.